![]() Despite this, astrology remains for some an important source for advice regarding choices in a range of different matters, including career and relationships. This paper examines astrology, a concept that is considered unscientific by broad segments of the population in the western world. Our aim is to provide clinical psychologists with an entry point into this rich, fascinating, and often overlooked literature.Įxpected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, Volume 19 is May 2023. A whole host of factors can lead people to make supernatural attributions, including contextual factors, specific beliefs, psychopathology, cognitive styles and personality, and social and cultural influences. Although supernatural attributions sometimes involve dramatic experiences seen to violate natural laws, people more commonly think of supernatural entities working indirectly through natural events. This article provides a broad overview of research on supernatural beliefs and attributions with special attention to their psychological relevance: They can serve as coping resources, sources of distress, psychopathology signals, moral guides, and decision-making tools. Although not widely studied in clinical psychology, these beliefs and attributions are a key part of human diversity. We propose an account situated within current models of semantic control.įor many people worldwide, supernatural beliefs and attributions-those focused on God, the devil, demons, spirits, an afterlife, karma, or fate-are part of everyday life. Our findings suggest that compensatory processes, triggered by experiencing lack of control, can promote divergent thinking. ![]() In both experiments, we observed higher scores in all creativity tasks for participants who recalled loss-of-control events than for those recalling in-control events. Immediately afterwards, they had to perform a set of tasks tapping (divergent) creative thinking. Participants were asked to think about an incident in their life wherein they felt either to be in control or to lose control of the situation. control) can also foster creative thinking, which we operationalized as the ability to produce associative and dissociative combinations of either related and unrelated concepts. In two identical experiments we investigated whether the feeling of lacking control (vs. The sense of lack of control has been shown to foster illusory pattern perception, superstition, conspiracy and religious beliefs. ![]() However, the picture is more complex than this ( Kaufmann, 2003 ), as a significant facilitation effect of negative mood on performance has actually been observed in some creative problem-solving tasks, even if only when participants are thought to try to optimize their solution to the problem by evaluating the different options that had come to their mind (i.e., when considering the solutions produced in a relatively late phase, instead of the first, early solutions produced by the participants Kaufmann & Vosburg, 1997 Kaufmann & Vosburg, 2002 ). ![]() According to some authors (e.g., Amabile et al., 2005 Clobert et al., 2016 Madan et al., 2019 ), negative emotions (vs positive) impair divergent creativity, which is the opposite of what we found. Given that the experience of lack of control is an aversive state ( Whalen, 1998 see also Kay, Whitson, Gaucher, & Galinsky, 2009 ), if the experience of lack of control has triggered emotions in our participants, these emotions are likely to be negative emotions.
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